And mightiest of all is he whose exploits leap from the pages of The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkinby Joe Troiano.

Just how am I acquainted with Spookley? I’m glad I asked…

Years ago, I went to lunch with a couple of friends from work. One of them had to fulfill some sort of quest in the local Barnes & Noble, and we followed him inside.

Who could have known that Destiny awaited within?

There, in the shadowy vestibule, a long table sagged beneath the weight of many fine volumes, as if someone had spread all the wisdom of the ancients before us. A column of orange tomes towered over us as if to say, “No need to pass beyond this shadowy vestibule. I am all the book you need.”

And it spoke the truth.

What secrets of the cosmos did The Legend of Spookley the SquarePumpkin offer? What mysteries from beyond time and space were about to reveal themselves?

As the astute observer will surmise, our hero, Spookley, is a sapient pumpkin. He is also a rectangular cuboid square, which anyone who knows their gourds will realize is a suboptimal shape. He lives in a society divided into two factions: the round pumpkins and the square pumpkins. Sadly, Spookley is the only square pumpkin.

But when a violent windstorm threatens pumpkinkind with destruction, who among them is of the perfect shape to save the day?

The answer is but one of innumerable secrets that await within its pages.

To be honest, I don’t know for certain how everything turned out for the pumpkins, since we had to leave the shadowy vestibule even as the legend’s dramatic conclusion began to unfold. But I’m sure it ends well, and that the pumpkins learn a valuable life lesson–one that passes itself on to the reader.

And though this post may have been more appropriate for October, Spookley’s legend is such that it does not conform to Time as we mere mortals reckon it.

* * *

What discoveries have you made in the shadowy vestibule of your local bookstore? What’s your favorite book featuring sapient vegetables? And would you care to describe your favorite hat?

Okay, so really it’s more like “these questions eleven” than “these questions three.” And instead of a mystical bridgekeeper with wild hair and skin in desperate need of a soothing ointment, we have the delightful and always-pleasant Tami Clayton, who was kind enough to think of me when it was her turn to tag people for some sort of question-themed blog game.

But I couldn’t pass up a chance to deploy a Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference, now could I?

Currently I #amreading Arena of Antares, by Kenneth Bulmer writing as Alan Burt Akers. It is book 7 in the Dray Prescot series, which first saw publication in 1972 and runs through 53 volumes, though the last several have only appeared in German.

Like the John Carter stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Dray Prescot series belongs to the “sword and planet” subgenre of science fiction and they are similar in many ways. Inconceivable forces hurl a mighty Earthman to a new world more savage than the one of his birth, catapulting him into the middle of rugged adventure. He hits things with swords, leaps from burning airships, arm-wrestles creatures who have more limbs than is proper, and resists the alluring charms of mysterious women–sometimes all at once.